The Renaissance: A Short History

by Paul Johnson

  Having said this, however, it must be admitted that the architectural history of the new St. Peter’s is extremely complicated. A truly great church appears to have a vigorous life of its own, and at times the architects successively connected with it seem little more than flies buzzing round the site. Work on the proposed site for the new church had actually begun as far back as 1452, under Bernardo Rossellino, and the foundations then laid had a permanent effect on the structures later placed upon them, like a palimpsest emerging through the writing that covers it. There were various stops and starts before Bramante took over. His first plan on paper (1506), a beautiful affair in orange wash and brown ink, actually survives. It envisaged a centralized, square church, with four subsidiary domes as well as the main one. One of his assistants, Giuliano da Sangallo, criticized this concept, and Bramante scrapped it for a more longitudinal shape. When Julius II died, there were further changes under the new pope, Leo X, a Medici with ideas of his own. The central piers, though reduced in size, had been completed when Bramante himself died in 1514. Sangallo and his other assistant, Fra Giocondo, then took over, but the pope put the young Raphael of Urbino (1483–1520) in overall charge. Raphael abandoned some of Bramante’s ideas, but in other ways he reverted to his original plan, adding bits of his own. But he too died in 1520, together with his amendments, which were either never built or demolished. Sangallo produced an alternative, which survives as a wooden model. But the sack of Rome, and subsequent lack of cash, prevented much from being done. Sangallo in turn died in 1546, whereupon the aging Michelangelo (he was seventy) was told to take over. He produced yet another plan, which involved clearing out the completed Raphael-Sangallo portions more or less entirely and again reverting to Bramante. So much of the present interior is essentially Michelangelo’s work, but following Bramante’s idea.

  Michelangelo was obsessed by the dome, and produced a number of designs leaning heavily on Brunelleschi’s Florentine dome. What he eventually produced is much more complicated and monumental, with strongly articulated curved buttresses descending into twin columns outside the drum. He actually built the drum, but when he died in 1564, no work had been done on the dome. By now the pope was Pius IV, who told the two new architects, Pirro Ligorio and Giacomo da Vignola, to carry out Michelangelo’s plans without argument. Pirro ignored this injunction, started his own work on the attic inside the dome and was sacked. Vignola reintroduced the idea of subsidiary domes, which Bramante had abandoned more than sixty years before, and his successor, Giacomo della Porta, actually built two flanking domes, as we see them today. He demolished what was left of Bramante’s choir, vaulted Michelangelo’s dome, but increased the rake, and this meant that the outer shell is much steeper than Michelangelo’s broad shape, as well as nearly thirty feet higher. The dome was complete by 1593, but della Porta had to employ an engineer, Domenico Fontana, to work out the stresses, something none of his predecessors would have done, and evidence of the increasing specialization of the building industry, now operating with colossal masses. However, in architecture what matters is what is actually put up, and remains put up. Della Porta’s dome is markedly different in silhouette from Michelangelo’s, but it was built, and after a few years began to look not only right but inevitable. So his is the great dome shape that was imitated throughout Rome and eventually all over Europe. Thus della Porta, though not a great architect, certainly became an influential one.

  There remained the façade, which had also been designed by Michelangelo, on a scale and width that even Bramante might have thought a touch too grandiose. It was more like an emperor’s palace than the front of a church, with its giant pilasters and pillars and endless bays. The spirit of this design was eventually carried out by a succession of five architects, culminating in the great Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), who completed the work and then went on to lay out the piazza in front of the church, with its flanking colonnades, finished in 1667. Thus this great church took more than two centuries to be built, and was the work of more than a dozen architects under thirty-two popes, some of whom interfered directly and imposed their own ideas or vetoes, and it spanned the mid-fifteenth-century Renaissance, the High Renaissance and the Baroque. (I am ignoring the sacristy and the clocks, the work of Rococo times.) This wonderful building, closely examined, bears all the marks of its long evolution and manifold progenitors. Yet, as with its dome, because we are used to it, it looks right, as though the endless squabbles, changes of plan and demolitions had never been. It illustrates the problem of writing architectural history, and indeed of being an architect, who can never be in quite the same control of his work as a painter or sculptor is. So, who built St. Peter’s? The answer is that God and time built St. Peter’s, but insofar as any one man did it, it was Bramante.

  Michelangelo’s proposed façade for St. Peter’s, which embroiders on rather than reflects the interior it conceals, and is wider too, breaks all the rules of architecture as laid down by Vitruvius, Alberti or anyone else. And the reason for this is that Michelangelo did not enter the art or trade as a novice, eager to learn, but as a world-famous sculptor, more anxious to teach. His grandiose sculptural schemes required appropriate architectural settings. The settings required appropriate churches, or other buildings, to house them. The search for appropriateness, therefore, produced a natural progression from sculpting to architecture. The first work for which he was responsible was the great pontifical fortress of Sant’-Angelo in Rome (1515–16). It is punctuated with sculptural devices, as though the itch to carve was still stronger than the need to tell workmen what to do. Leo, a Medici, also wanted Michelangelo to complete the family church of San Lorenzo in Florence with a marble sculptured façade, and drawings and a wooden model for this project survive. But there were disagreements and quarrels over the cost of the proposal and nothing came of it.

  Michelangelo did, however, carry out two works for another Medici pope, Clement VII, at San Lorenzo—a sacristy and a library. Both are based on ideas he plucked from antiquity, both ignore Vitruvian and any other rules, and both exhibit the fertility of his imagination. He made up his architectural vernacular as he went along, improvising and inventing, so that nothing he did is like anything done before by others, or even by himself. His contemporaries and successors found this disconcerting, and Vasari criticized him as a rule breaker. The sacristy is really a tomb-depository for Medici grandees, which suited Michelangelo, a tomb-designer-turned-architect, and his details are extraordinarily inventive. But they overwhelm the whole, which lacks unity. It should be regarded as a preparation for the Laurentian Library and its vestibule, which came later (1524, completed 1562). For this library, and its staggering stair approach, Michelangelo turned architecture outside in; that is, he used the structural features one finds on the outside of a building as decorative features for the interior. Windows, whether oblong or square, become blind recesses or tabernacles; entrances become doors or mere punctuations in blank walls; pillars or pilasters, instead of supporting the roof, frame the nonwindows; while the ceiling reflects the decorative non-functionalism of the walls rather than suggests how it hangs there or what architectural machinery it conceals. There are all kinds of ingenious inventions that catch and delight the eye, and the style of everything is consciously classical, or rather classicism as reinvented by Michelangelo. Yet one cannot help feeling that he was unconsciously following the same exuberant route as the late-Gothic stonemason-architects, who turned functional forms into wildly extravagant ornaments.

  This progress from use into fancy is carried still further in the vestibule staircase, from which the visitor ascends from the church cloister into the library. The elegant sets of windows let in no light and serve no function save decoration, the beautiful marble columns support nothing and the three-pronged staircase achieves no purpose by its complexities save to delight. Michelangelo defended it by saying that the servants would line the outer steps on each side while their masters proceeded up or down the central stairs.
But this is an excuse, not a reason. On the other hand, the whole thing is enchanting, in color no less than in form, and the details, as always with this master, are beautifully inventive. The marble is served up crisply, as befits an accomplished chisel man, and there is an inherent simplicity about it all that allows you to take in the concept as a whole and then turn to its highly imaginative parts. No work more clearly demonstrates what distinguishes great architecture from the routine. But Michelangelo’s manner is prominent in every inch: it is mannered, and it set mankind on the long trek from the High Renaissance through Mannerism to the Baroque and so to Rococo. This staircase hall is the distant ancestor, by direct descent, of the vast Treppelhaus in the Bishop’s Palace at Würzburg, which Tiepolo turned into the largest artistic artifact in world history.

  From this wonderful concept in Florence, Michelangelo returned to Rome to design and (largely) complete a great outdoor architectural scheme, the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill. This began when Paul III moved the famous antique equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which had inspired Donatello’s and Verrocchio’s efforts in the genre, from the Lateran Palace and asked Michelangelo to design a new base. The great sculptor, in characteristic fashion, began by creating an elegant but imposing overall base for the huge work, then opened up the project into an enormous architectural setting, with a decorative pavement, a monumental staircase ramp, a new façade for the building at the top of it, the Palazzo Senatorio, and new flanking buildings on either side. The whole splendid composition may have evolved organically as the master proceeded, or it may have been in his mind from the start, or a bit of both. It finally involved further oval steps below the pavement, and the resulting ensemble has a naturalness and simplicity and yet an impressive grandeur that bely its accidental origins. No one of any sensibility can fail to delight in walking about it, taking it in as a whole and relishing its felicitous details.

  Michelangelo’s heavy and often frustrating work on St. Peter’s dominated the last part of his life, but he engaged in other projects, which included work on the Farnese Palace, Santa Maria degli Angeli and the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome. He also designed a monumental city gate in Rome, the Porta Pia, which ended a new street of magnificent houses and gardens pushed out from the Quirinale by Pope Pius IV. All these works and others, some of which survive only in designs and plans, complete the vernacular of Michelangelo’s architecture, a rich vocabulary of lion’s heads, eggs-and-darts, dentils and acanthus leaves, coats of arms and crenellations pulled from the Middle Ages, grinning masks and triglyphs, and all the orders of antiquity, plus composites of his own invention, broken pediments, sphinxes supporting closed ones, swags, receding and overlapping planes, echoes of Doric, Corinthian and Ionic capitals flaunted as decorative features and his characteristic inversions—façades introduced as profiles and vice versa. The fertility is awe-inspiring and at times overwhelming, also pathetic and moving, considering that some of these explosions of the imagination occurred when the old man was in his eighties, an immense age for those days. They swirled away into history to become the stock-in-trade of professional mediocrities for hundreds of years and the base on which the few geniuses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrought marvels. It is likely that Michelangelo found his architectural career as frustrating as his sculptural one, but the consequences of both, often overlapping, resonate through the ages.

  Many of these wonderful decorative devices were eventually to find natural homes in Venice, where Michelangelo’s exuberance was the norm, though he never, alas, worked there. Venice came only slowly to the Renaissance, perhaps because it was by history and instinct a profoundly Gothic city (and, if Ruskin could have had his way, would have remained exclusively so). Indeed it is Italy’s only genuine Gothic city. But, by a curious paradox, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which should have extinguished its prosperity, actually increased it, initially at least, and led Venice to expand inward, thus linking it more firmly to Renaissance developments at a time when it was anxious to spend money on its visual aggrandizement. Renaissance architecture was brought to the city in the 1470s from outside, chiefly by Pietro Lombardo and Mauro Codussi, who were responsible for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, Santa Maria dei Miracoli (Lombardo), San Michele in Isola (Codussi) and Santa Maria Formosa (Codussi), as well as many palaces, such as the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli and the Palazzo Loredan.

  In 1527 the brilliant Florentine artist Jacopo Sansovino (1486–1570) settled in Venice. He had begun life as a sculptor, but had formed contracts with the ramifying Sangallo family, who provided no less than five prominent Renaissance architects. Sansovino reconstructed the entire San Marco area, providing the mint or Zecca, the Loggetta at the bottom of the campanile, completing the piazza, clearing the piazzetta and building opposite the Doge’s Palace the beautiful St. Mark’s Library (Libreria Marciana). He also built one of the grandest Renaissance palaces, the Palazzo Dolfin (1538), which shows the influence of the treatise published the year before by Sebastiano Serlio, Venice’s contribution to architectural theory. By this point, architects were thriving in the city. They included Antonio Scarpagnino, who built the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Fabbriche Vecchie and the Palazzo dei Dieci Savi, and Michele Sanmicheli, responsible for the magnificent Palazzo Grimani as well as the Palazzo Corner at San Polo. The contract to design the new Rialto Bridge was won by Antonio da Ponte (1588), in competition not only with Sansovino but with a proposal made earlier by Andrea Palladio (1518–1580).

  Palladio (originally Andrea di Pietro della Gondola) ranks as Venice’s greatest architect, indeed one of the greatest in Italian history. But he actually came from Padua, where he was trained as a stonemason. At the age of sixteen he broke his contract and went to Vicenza, where he worked on decorative sculptures and formed contacts with the local rich—he was, says his first biographer, Paolo Gualdo, “an extremely social man.” He did villa work for the poet Giangiorgio Trissino, who gave him the name “Palladio,” the angelic messenger in the epic he was writing, and he also met the Paduan theorist Alvise Cornaro, whose palace had an odeon and a loggia designed by Giovanni Maria Falconetto, among the earliest Renaissance buildings in the area (1524–30). Trissino took him to Rome (1541) to study antiquities and see what was being built there, and he returned to the city on similar expeditions on four more occasions. Though not formally educated, then, Palladio was the scholar type of architect, who knew all the treatises available and helped to translate Vitruvius, providing beautiful illustrations. Indeed, his drawings are central to his work.

  Palladio believed in drama; he believed in settings. He placed his buildings in their surroundings in his mind’s eye before he set to work designing them, so that they all have a geographical and spatial context. He was an architect who not only drew but who painted his buildings into the scene. The mind boggles at what he might have accomplished in Rome, where all the buildings are part of a gigantic and historic urban landscape. As it was, Venice provided an equally exciting setting for his imagination, and his work on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, across the basin from St. Mark’s, altered the visual skyline of Venice permanently and gave the city much of the magic we all love. He built the refectory of the San Giorgio monastery there, making it both simple, even severe, and monumental (1560). The monks were so pleased they commissioned him to rebuild their church. The result was magnificent, seen from across the water from the piazzetta—dramatic, elegant, almost ethereal, depending on the season and the weather. That of course was how it was meant to be seen. Looked at close to, it is less impressive, and the interior disappoints, Palladio not being a man who thought of churches as primarily places of worship. It was, then, a vision, not based on any classical model or recent creation by Brunelleschi, Alberti et al., but sui generis, a piece of wonderful stage scenery. It has been criticized, but no one who has seen it—Ruskin apart—would wish it changed. His other great Venetian church, the Redentore, is mor
e carefully designed for use, though its peculiarity as a votive church, where the rich made solemn vows and gave thanks for mercies, often in the form of huge processions, demanded theatrical effects. The water façade, from which it is entered, is a virtuoso display of the classical orders and proportions, crowned by giant statues, and is another of the great sights of Venice, with the dome and spires crouching behind and constantly changing their relationship to the front as you come up to it by gondola. The interior of the church, however, also functions well and has always been much used.

  In fact, while Palladio had a taste and a genius for theatrical effects, and could be quite ruthless at achieving them at the expense of function, he was fundamentally, odd as it may seem, a practical architect who designed his buildings for use. Most of his life he spent designing villas or country houses, and he set out his principles. In 1570 he published his Quattro libri dell’architettura, four books that describe, in order, general principles and technology, private residential buildings, public secular buildings, and antique temples. In the second of these he insists that the villa is the center of an agricultural estate. It must be situated, therefore, with a view to the well-being of the land, so that the owner may supervise it properly. And it must be built with agricultural aspects in mind—however noble and imposing, the farm must be catered for in the structure.

  Moreover, although Palladio was a classical architect in that he knew and understood everything about the theory and practice of antiquity—insofar as the knowledge was then available—he insisted that he followed the antique because it was functional as well as beautiful. He did not hesitate to introduce his own fundamental modifications of design when they added to utility, though he ensured they added grace too. This firm foundation of sense and flexibility of execution help to explain why he was so successful in his day, why his houses work as well as please and why they were so generally followed for generations, all over Europe.